She's Come Undone (45 page)

He looked at himself, then closed his eyes and smiled.

In bed that night, I lay awake shaking because I'd come so close to telling him the truth. I'd lose him if I did. Those two nights without him had rocked me back to my senses. “Home Ec” was the person he loved—not fat, crazy Dolores. Liar, letter thief. Beached whale.

*   *   *

He was his summer self again for a while, gentle and teasing.

“What would I have to do? I don't know anything about being a chaperone,” I told him the night he said he'd volunteered us. A roomful of high school students was not something I was looking forward to.

“Oh, you know. Patrol the lavatory like a prison matron. Breathalyzer tests at the front entrance. That sort of thing.”

“Come on, Dante. I mean it.”

“Don't sweat it,” he said, kissing me. “You're eminently qualified.”

The closest thing I had to a fancy dress was my flower-print muumuu. I borrowed Dante's Volkswagen and drove to Burlington to shop. In a way, it was funny, I thought: me finally getting to go to a high school formal.

I found the dress I wanted in a store run by two elderly sisters. Both wore their eyeglasses suspended on gold chains. The dress was an unpredictable choice for me—risky and overpriced—and it took me a whole afternoon's worth of shopping elsewhere before I finally returned to the store and surrendered to it.

The gauzy material was smoky blue with silver thread running through it; the beadwork sewn into the bodice gave me a gypsyish look. The sisters made me try it on. Size ten fit me better than size twelve.

“Fanny, look at this on her!” one said to the other when I emerged from the dressing room.

Fanny reached down for her glasses. “Stunning!” she said. “I use that word all the time with customers. But this time I really mean it.”

“And it falls beautifully on you,” her sister said. “Twirl.”

I laughed and looked away from the full-length mirror.

“I mean it,” she said. “Twirl!”

I twirled. Slowly at first, then faster. The gathers of the dress unfolded themselves and the material lifted up and outward—I opened up like a morning glory.
“You're a beautiful young woman,”
Dr. Shaw's voice said. He was finally right.

The sisters both applauded me. The three of us laughed. I wanted Ma.

Back in the dressing room, I lifted the dress up over me, hung it on the hanger, and stopped. Some awareness was hovering on the surface, something that made the giddy feeling keep coming. My mind kept twirling. I reached beneath the elastic of my bra and felt my breasts. They were sensitive to my touch in a way that was both sexy and painful—a new feeling. The knowledge hit me so hard that I slumped to the floor, my shoulder blades skidding along the dressing room wall on the way down.

“We were beginning to wonder if you'd fainted in there,” Fanny joked.

“Guess what?” I said. “I think I might be pregnant.”

Both women applauded again. Fanny took out her wallet and showed me her grandchildren's pictures. I don't recall the ride back to Montpelier.

*   *   *

The nausea started about a week later. “We can give you Bendectin for the queasiness,” the doctor at the clinic told me. Instead, I kept nibbling from my perpetual stack of Saltines, swallowing tiny bits of banana I hoped my stomach wouldn't notice. I told Dante a bad
stomach flu was going around at the store. At work I tried not to look head-on at the food that passed by my conveyor belt; on break, I opened the window to let out people's cigarette smoke, then sat by the fresh air with my feet up. I'd hidden a bottle of cold duck in my clothes hamper for when I finally broke the news to Dante. By my sixth week, I had already let several deadlines slip by.

On prom night, Dante dressed in his regular school clothes: Levi's, blue work shirt, brown corduroy jacket, incongruous tie. I made him go sit in his apartment before I took my new dress out of the plastic bag. I was withholding myself from him, like a bride. I hadn't thrown up once that day. The cold duck was in the refrigerator for after the dance.

“Oh, wow,” was what he said when he saw me. I had splurged and bought matching jeweled barrettes for my hair and a makeup job at Chez Jolie.

“Am I really beautiful in this dress?” I asked him. Three whole futures rode on his answer.

“On a scale of one to five,” he said, “I'd give you a six. In the dress or out of it.”

*   *   *

The dance had a theme: “Time in a Bottle.” Girls began running toward Dante before we'd even crossed the length of the gym. He assigned me to a math teacher named Boomer and his wife Paula and then let students sweep him off to the dance floor.

The decorations were fishnets hung from the basketball hoops and filled with balloons and papier-mâché seashells. In the center of the gym, cordoned off by a three-foot-high picket fence, were a giant cellophane bottle with a wall clock in its stomach and a mermaid propped up in a peacock chair. I recognized the mermaid as one of those life-sized rubber mouth-to-mouth-breathing dummies. The decorators had stripped her of her sweat suit and outfitted her with a paisley bra and a papier-mâché fish fin. Someone had pinned a hibiscus in her stiff nylon hair.

Boomer talked only in monosyllables but Paula made up for him, yelling chitchat over the blare of the band. “You sure aren't like Dante's last girlfriend,” she shouted.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I don't know exactly. You just seem more like us—a faculty wife.” Which meant frumpy, I guessed. Dress shields or no dress shields, it was too late to return the dress.

I spent the first hour sitting on a metal folding chair in back of the punch table, collecting students' silent appraisals, a smile stretched across my face like a rubber band. Paula explained her life: how she was different from her three sisters, why she'd bothered to get braces at age thirty-three, the gory details of the C-section that had produced her and Boomer's three-year-old, Ashley. No one seemed to notice how beautiful I looked.

I was surprised at how well-developed the high school girls were; I hadn't remembered those ripe-fruit bodies when I was dodging everyone at Easterly High. But even at two hundred and forty pounds, high school had been a disembodying experience for me. I'd floated those four years of my life—had looked down at the linoleum and not returned a single stare.

In another couple of months, my pregnancy would shape me like one of Dante's eggplants.
Our Bodies, Ourselves
said some men were turned on by pregnant bodies, but I doubted that. I figured I knew more about the way men reacted to swollen women than that writer did.

The students' filthy language shocked me. One girl done up in banana curls and carrying a parasol called her boyfriend a “fuckin' douche bag” right as I was passing them their cups of Neptune's Nectar. The foam and the smell of it and the way she talked all made my stomach heave.

Since my life with Dante, I'd stopped swearing as much. Not consciously, really; it had just happened.
“Foul language is part of your armor of defense,
” Dr. Shaw was always fond of pointing out.
Dante only swore when he was angry, hurling the words like sharpened spears.

From the dance floor, he managed a wave from time to time. A line of girls kept cutting in on each other to dance with him. I watched him make each dancer laugh and beam. He seemed like a celebrity actor making a guest appearance—someone you could see and admire but not talk to. He kept to the center of the room.

During the band's break, I hooked my chin over his shoulder and collapsed against him. “Having a good time?” he asked.

“You sure are popular,” I said.

He kissed me on the ear amidst the gaping. “Dante, don't,” I whispered. “I feel like I'm under a microscope or something.”

“Well,” he laughed, “you are.” Then the music started up again and some girl tapped his shoulder.

Back at the punch bowl, I asked Paula what Dante's last girlfriend was like.

She reached inside her dress, fiddling with her bra strap. “Well, her name was Rafaela—that should tell you something. Had a good idea of herself. At the end-of-the-year banquet last spring, she wore this white jersey dress and you could see her nipples plain as day. I hate when they do that. You're supposed to be too sophisticated to look, so the pressure's on everyone but her. She was
that
type—you know.”

Paula changed the subject to zucchini bread, but by that time I was panicky. Turning to check on Dante, I knocked smack into a passing student carrying three cups. Punch splashed down the front of my new dress.

“Oh, cheese whiz,” Paula said. “Cold water! It's the best thing for it. It was in ‘Hints from Heloise' last week. March right into that bathroom before it sets and get some cold water on it, icy as possible.”

The long row of bathroom sinks reminded me of Hooten Hall; so did the stares. Two girls were standing in a cloud of cigarette smoke. They each had the same hairstyle: long in back, parted in the
middle, bangs hot-combed into curls as tight as playing-card jacks. I wet down the stain, then scratched at it with my fingernails and a wad of sopping paper towels. I recognized one of the smokers.

“Mr. Davis is a fox and a half,” one of them began. I looked up in the mirror at their staring.

“Really,” the other said. “I wouldn't throw him out of bed.”

“Eddie Ann!” the other shrieked in mock horror. “Shut your fuckin' mouth, girl.”

“He could have sex with any girl at this school,” she continued. “He doesn't need to visit the dog pound.”

Her mirror image held my gaze as if we were dueling—as if the one who looked away second would win Dante. I didn't feel angry; I felt maternal. In another seven months I'd be somebody's mother. Besides, her photo order had landed me here. Women, unite! I thought.

I walked over to her. “I want to tell you something,” I said. “You can consider it a gift.”

Her mouth was smirking but her eyes looked scared. She blinked.

“High school is like a sickness. Trust me, the fever breaks. Then you get over it.”

Walking out, I heard their indignant laughter, louder than it needed to be. “Some gift!” Eddie Ann shouted. “What's
her
fucking problem?”

*   *   *

That night in bed, Dante came and I couldn't. When he fell asleep, I got up out of bed and crossed the hall to my apartment. My dress was hanging against the door. You had to go looking for the stain to find it. I could get married in that dress.

I went back across the hall and climbed into Dante's bed. Our bed. That Rafaela could come back into his life tomorrow. I wanted him and the baby both—permanently.

“Dante,” I said. “Wake up.”

He squinted into the glare of the bedside light. “What?” he said. “What's the matter?” His eyelids were slits.

“I think I'm pregnant,” I said.

“Come on.” He smiled.

“I'm serious.”

“How?” he said.

I told him I'd been careful about taking the pills. “Religious” was the word I used. “It just happened,” I shrugged.

“Then we have to do something. I don't want any kids.”

I waited before I answered. “Why not?”

“Because I don't, that's all.”

“That's not a reason.”

“Because they shit their diapers and spill their milk at supper. I just don't want the
fucking
responsibility.”

I lay on my back, rigid, tears dropping fast down the sides of my face. My mind was revving. I got out of bed to vomit.

When I came out of the bathroom, he was sitting up in bed, arms across his chest, staring at the ceiling.

“But you
love
kids, Dante,” I said. “You call your students your kids. You act very paternal.” At least I thought he had, up until I'd seen him dancing with all of them.

“They'll probably blow up the planet in another ten years. Having a child is irresponsible. . . . We'd have to buy one of those stroller things. Life-insurance men would start calling up.”

“No they wouldn't.”

“Yes they would. We'd have to push the bureau in front of the bedroom door whenever we wanted to fuck. Couldn't even say the word ‘fuck' anymore. ‘Dolores, would you like to go make nice-nice?'”

“We just wouldn't let those things happen.”

“Sure we would. This friend of mine, Nick? Perfectly intelligent mind, philosophy major in college, and now he knows all those dumb-ass Sesame Street puppets by their names—Bert and Bernie
or whoever the fuck they are. Acts like they're friends of the family, for Christ's sake.”

“We can't decide anything right now,” I said. “Let's get some sleep.”

“Yippee, kiddies, it's time for Captain Kangaroo!”

“Okay, okay. I'm tired. I get your point.”

“You get it or you agree with it?”

“I'm tired.”

“Goddamnit, Dolores. Now you've got me all riled up.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I've got to calm down. Let's fuck again.”

“Stop calling it that!” I hadn't meant to scream.

“See?” he said. “It's happening already!”

After ten minutes of silence, I reached for him.

This time I did come—hard and fast, painfully.

In the silence, afterward, he got out of bed and dressed.

“Dante, where are you going? It's the middle of the night.”

At the door, he pushed me aside. I listened to the Volkswagen go down the hill and across town, keeping track of the sound for well over a mile.

*   *   *

He kept his apartment door closed for a week. When he came home afternoons from school, he played music so loud it vibrated the walls.

I couldn't tell if my vomiting was from being pregnant or being abandoned. “Your test is positive,” the woman from the clinic had told me over the phone the day I called in for results. “If that's good news, you should come in for an appointment within the next week. If it isn't, there are options we can discuss, the sooner the better.”